Newsletter

Sign up for our regular newsletter and get the latest news for our developer community.

Spotify Apps API (Discontinued)

This API is no longer available.

Posted on 29 October 2014

Please note: Future releases of the Spotify Desktop client will no longer feature an App Finder tab and will no longer support the presentation of Spotify Apps, therefore this API has been discontinued.

With the growing importance of mobile devices and with many developers asking for the tools to build apps outside of our desktop platform, we recognized the need to make a new set of APIs and SDKs available. These would ensure the Spotify platform remained relevant and easy to develop on, as well as enabling you to build innovative and engaging music experiences.

As a result, we launched our new Web API and mobile SDKs for iOS and Android in June. These fulfill many of the requests we’ve heard from the community and we’ve already seen great adoption of the Web API in particular, from innovative apps to community-sourced wrappers for most popular programming languages:

BBC Playlister lets you explore and save music from the BBC to Spotify.

Soundhound enables you to identify a song by listening to it. Once the song is tagged, you can easily add it to your Spotify library without ever leaving the app.

Swarm.fm lets you discover and explore music from your friends. Swarm.fm launched as a Spotify app and moved out to the web once the Web API was made available.

In our latest desktop player, you can see synchronized lyrics from the world’s largest official catalog of lyrics — Musixmatch. Just start playing a track, then click the LYRICS button. If you are a member of the Musixmatch community, you can even add lyrics for your favorite songs.

As Spotify evolves and priorities change, we sometimes have to remove APIs from active development and shift focus to the relevant platforms. With the new APIs and SDKs now available we are phasing out Spotify Apps support from the desktop client. In the upcoming version you will no longer be able to run third-party applications within the desktop client. This means the App Finder and apps inside the desktop client will no longer be available and we are terminating our Application Distribution Agreement.

The update will gradually roll out from today, starting with a smaller percentage of new and existing users, with the majority of our existing users receiving the update early in 2015.

Please contact us if you have any questions about these changes. We’ve also provided an FAQ on the developer site to answer some of the most common questions.

FAQ

Can I stream music directly on my website now using the new APIs and SDKs?

We do not support web streaming at this point, except through the Spotify Play Button. However, we do provide 30 second previews in our Web API, which allows you to deliver a preview of every track in the Spotify catalogue to your users.

Do I still need to send my new app for review to Spotify’s submission approval team?